From the Executive Director (Winter 2006)

by Ute Wartenberg Kagan

Dear Members and Friends,

I am writing to you at the end of another successful year at the ANS. It started off with the most successful gala event the ANS has ever hosted. We honored ANS Fellow Dave Bowers, whose many friends and acquaintances celebrated with him at a great evening at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. The event raised over $300,000, which has greatly helped to support our programs and activities. Our upcoming gala is in January, at which Chet Krause will be honored. I am particularly delighted that the Trustees of the ANS chose Chet Krause, whose publications have been of such value to so many people all over the world. I remember vividly how relieved I once was in the British Museum to find that there was a Krause Standard Catalogue of World Coins, when I was confronted with some completely unfamiliar coins that had been handed in by some visitor for identification. And little did I realize that one day I would meet Mr. Krause himself. We are delighted to formally acknowledge at our gala event his contribution to the pursuits of coin collecting and numismatic scholarship. I hope many of you will join us at this happy event.

Further good news for the ANS is the appointment of Andrew Meadows to the position of a second Margaret Thompson Curator of Greek Coins. He will be taking up his appointment on April 1. He has been working as Greek Curator at the British Museum for the last eleven years, and his experience with exhibition, administration, and publication will be an invaluable asset to the ANS. With this appointment, the ANS is continuing to build a creative team of scholars who make the collections of the ANS available to a wider audience. We are continuing our search for more funding in the Roman and Islamic field.

In the last three months we have been hosting a number of successful events, which were all made available to members via the Internet. We hope that more people will take these opportunities to participate in ANS events. We are also pleased to announce two new publications, both of which have just appeared. One is the long-awaited COAC on Caribbean coins, which covers, in over three hundred pages, several articles by specialists in this field. The other is a volume in honor of our Vice President Jack Kroll, which presents cutting-edge research by some of the leading scholars in ancient Greek numismatics and economics.

This issue of the ANS Magazine has a fascinating piece by ANS Fellow Ira Rezak, which “stars” the famous 1906 fire and earthquake in San Francisco. As regular readers will notice, we are receiving more submissions from members and the general public. I am also most grateful to Susan and David Tripp for their kind assistance with the article on the Garrett archives and collections. The fascinating photo on the front cover is a rare period image of the famous Sphinx at Giza, with the Garrett brothers standing on her back! This is a historic photo with an unusual view, and we are very proud to open this issue of the ANS Magazine with it.